Thank You for Ten: Short Fiction About a Little Theater

by Ty Unglebower

  *

  His mind remained clear and focused until the end of the penultimate scene. Upon the final exit of the tall gray-haired fellow that had slapped his shoulder during intermission, his mood changed. It was time to get ready.

  As the performers entered for the final scene, Patrick stood up and pulled on his costume jacket. He checked the stupid hanky, made a few adjustments to the light board, and placed his finger over the button which would begin the ultra-slow fade that they had rehearsed. He double checked the settings on his second cell phone, and placed it exactly in the spot he had marked the previous day.

  "All set up here," Patrick spoke into his headset.

  "Break a leg," Asher whispered through the other end.

  Then, his cue line was upon him. Patrick pressed the button for the long fade, opened the door, and snuck down the staircase. His feet still caused a muted ring but it was much better than the racket he made while wearing shoes.

  He gripped the handrail as he rounded the first curve of the stairs, his ears tuned to his headset. The lines from the actors, interspersed with hissing static were still clear as he reached the bottom of the staircase and pushed on the door.

  It caught on something and Patrick's breath caught as well. He pushed harder and whatever the obstruction was grated over the carpet and allowed him to pass through the small opening he had made. He glanced at the floor just long enough to see it was a small purse someone had left there which had not been there at intermission. No time to be annoyed.

  He glanced up at the lights. They appeared to be dimming ever so slightly. So far so good.

  Next he passed through the back doors and into the lobby, opening them only as much as he needed to slide through. One of the ushers was there at the ticket counter reading a book. She looked up at him and gave him the thumbs-up. He nodded and turned toward the exit. No rain outside.

  It was chilly though, despite it being an early spring evening. The sidewalk was cool on his slipper-clad feet. He made his way to the side of the building. He could barely hear the actors through his head set now.

  "Damn," he said to himself. He kept going, however, tapping on the headset and jiggling the wire a few times as he went. He moved faster, being unable to judge exactly where in the scene the actors were.

  Patrick arrived at the back entrance on the side of the building. The door was open, waiting for him as promised. He made a mental note to buy Asher a drink after the show for making sure everything was unfolding properly.

  He entered the green room. Several actors who had already made their final appearance sat chatting quietly on the various couches. One actress with a smaller part who would have passed for the ingénue in the cast had one been sought, leaned against one of the back walls chatting on her cell phone. A bit too loudly for the green room during a show, Patrick noted. He flipped the off switch on his now useless headset.

  He reached for his costume shoes and sat down in the chair provided for him. He was a line or two behind where he had been when he rehearsed all of this, but was making good time nonetheless. He laced the second shoe, stood up, and took a breath to collect himself. He reached for the phone.

  It wasn't there.

  "The hell?" he asked to the air. He checked the table, under the table, all the nearby tables. Willing to bare the wrath of the costume designer later he got down on his knees and scanned the floor nearby, all the while his cue line to enter getting closer and closer. He would need all 15 of the spare seconds he usually achieved, and then some.

  "Where's the phone?" he asked. Nobody replied so he asked again louder.

  "Which phone?" asked the gray-haired man.

  "The one I used to do the stupid light thing," Patrick said. "It's supposed to be here and it's gone, I need it yesterday!"

  Several people leapt up from their seats, checking couch cushions, moving papers and other items to see if they could locate the vital piece of equipment. The entrance and the line was more important than bringing the house lights back up. But how would he alert everyone that the lights wouldn't be coming back up, if it came to that?

  An actress on stage gave one of his early cue lines. Almost everyone in the green room was looking at him now. Almost everyone. When he realized this, he got an awful idea.

  Patrick ran to the ingénue and grabbed her cell phone right out of her hands. She squealed in protest and reached for it.

  "She'll call you back," Patrick said into the phone and he moved toward The Funnel. The girl ran after him, but several other quick-thinking actors blocked her.

  He wouldn't have a moment to spare. He ran into the Funnel with the unfamiliar phone hoping it wouldn't go into lock mode first. Its lights mixed with the blue hue of backstage as he attempted to ascertain where the proper buttons were. He located all the numbers, pressed them and found "send" just as the actress onstage delivered his entrance cue line.

  "I do believe, my lord, the courier you dispatched has returned."

  Patrick was still on the far side of the stage. He couldn't enter on the left, because that would mean his character was coming from the kitchen, and not from town. The awkwardness of the pause on stage gripped his throat and he shuffled madly through the crew members assembled backstage. Asher was already looking at him.

  "That is, I believe I saw him pull into the drive moments ago," the actress on stage ad-libbed. Patrick, hands clasped behind his back, with his thumb on what he hoped was "send" stormed into the scene, almost tripping as he entered.

  "My lord, it falls upon me to inform you that the assembly has adjourned."

  He was somewhat short of breath as he delivered the line, and he had been late. Glancing up at the lights he could tell the fade was a bit further along into the action than it would have been had he been on time. But no matter. It might seem too dim near the end, but the fade was working. He thought some of the actors on the stage were trying to recite their lines faster in order to catch up to the delay.

  Moments later in the well-timed black out, the healthy applause told him that the audience had not noticed the hitch at all. The other actors entered the stage for the final company bow. He had pulled it off.

  Almost. For a moment he'd forgotten the phone. He hit send, and heard a beep. He'd hit the speakerphone button instead. In the dark, as the applause began to fade into a bit of confused chatter, Patrick turned around and scanned the glowing device in his hand until he found the proper button. He pressed it, and turned back around towards the darkness and the audience. It took longer than it had with his phone, but the light clicked back on. The audience (some of whom had stood up to leave) renewed their applause upon seeing the entire cast standing there, taking their company bow.

  On cue Patrick turned and exited the stage with everyone, never in his life having been so relieved at the end of a show. In the shuffle he felt a hand wrench the cell phone from him. He looked up just in time to see the phone's owner storming through the darkness of backstage. "Thanks, it was an emergency," he called to her. She didn't look back at him.

  "Anybody know what the hell happened to my phone?" Patrick asked over the din of actors returning to the green room as soon as he entered. A few of the people that had helped him look for the phone before his entrance stood about, seeming to expect answers themselves-as though it had been they that suffered near catastrophe. A few other actors looked at him, and mentioned they knew nothing, surprised that the phone had been moved.

  The rest of the actors kept moving without response, and he repeated his question loudly enough to surprise the group. Nobody ignored him this time.

  "It was right over here on the table with my shoes when I left after intermission," Patrick said, pointing toward the table.

  Nobody knew anything about it. Which is what he expected. Just as he began to survey the area for it, Jen came in from through the back door, having spent the show at a nearby bar having sodas while she didn't watch. "How'd it go?" she asked to the room. Asher answered.

 
"Good times," he said. "Round of applause for Patrick for getting that done almost without a hitch." Asher began clapping, and much of the room followed suit. For his own part Patrick didn't care about applause. He cared about two things: the fact that it was all over for the night, and finding his phone.

  "Almost without a hitch?" Jen asked. Asher explained the brief timing issue in a manner that made it sound less worrisome than it had actually been. Jen seemed satisfied. "It'll probably be the last time anyway," she said. "I ran into Aaron over at the King Richard. He said he'd come in for us and deliver that final line tomorrow and Sunday. If they can find a costume small enough for him."

  Patrick, though he felt he should have been relieved, was one part annoyed and one part disappointed. For a moment or two he just stood where he'd been once Jen left. Then he began his search for his phone. He still needed to find that, after all.

  He searched the green room. His own pockets. The dressing room. He'd given up when the actor who'd caught a chill at intermission reached for his jacket. A jacket that was lying on the table, and not hanging on the rack this time. The guy didn't even notice the small clicking sound the followed as he lifted his jacket off of the table. Without looking though, Patrick knew. He glanced at the table and saw his phone. Somehow, it had wedged itself into the pocket of the actor's coat when he'd carelessly tossed it on top of Patrick's stuff. Patrick stared at it a moment, and then laughed.

  The guy never should have put his coat there. Patrick knew he should have kept the phone on him the entire time, and that Jen should have had a better plan earlier in the week. And there were probably a dozen or so other things that should and should not have happened in the entire affair. But as he watched a small cluster of actors make their way outside he reminded himself that such was theater: chaos mixed with fear, leading to resourcefulness and in an amazing number of cases, success. (Or something close enough to it.) All because people find a way.

  And now it was time to find his way to the bar, and tell one of his new theater stories for the first time. He hoped he'd get it right.

  Theatrical Redundancy

  "And that's 12, I say again 12 coat racks," Stacy said, stepping out from behind one of them. Her friend Anna scribbled onto her clipboard. "You may want to add to your little note that it's 11 more than any theater needs.”

  "Are you going to say that every single time?" Anna asked as she brushed her dirty blond hair out of her face.

  "No. Only for the items this place has too many of," Stacy said. "And here let me."

  "Stacy I'm 31 years old, I don't want to wear a neon pink scrunchie."

  Stacy ignored her and stood behind her friend, doing up her hair into a more labor-friendly arrangement.

  "That's pretty tough talk coming from someone who spends her free time in a community theater.”

  "Stacy."

  "So much free time I may add that I hardly get to see her lately."

  "You're seeing me now," Anna said, glancing around the basement, and pointing to a pile of trunks near the coat racks. "Let's see what's over there."

  Stacy rolled her eyes. "I don't consider this the most exciting way to spend time with my best friend.”

  "How can you not think this is exciting?" Anna asked. "Look at all this stuff. It's like a sunken pirate ship." Anna spread her arms wide and spun around in a circle, indicating the various items that filled every corner of the basement of the Little Dionysus Playhouse. Coat racks. Lawn chairs. Statues. Oil paintings hung on the stone walls. Shelves of dust covered books. Bicycles. Helmets. Vintage phones. And that was just in the section they were standing in.

  "That's one big difference between you and me," Stacy said, dragging herself to the collection of trunks Anna had pointed to. "Twelve coat racks. You write it down on your little clipboard." Stacy scrunched up her nose and pretended to scribble notations onto her hand. "It's just props."

  "Coat racks aren't props. They're set pieces." Anna said.

  "Please don't explain the difference," Stacy said.

  "Stacy, if you're so miserable, just go home. I'll take inventory myself."

  "That's not what I said, come on now," Stacy told her. "I'm happy to help you. I'm here aren't I? I just admit, I don't get it." Stacy jiggled one of the wooden coat racks.

  "Get what?" Anna asked. She set down the clipboard and stood on tiptoe, reaching for the top trunk on the stack. Stacy, who was a good four inches taller came over and helped guide the trunk to the floor.

  "All this," Stacy said, extending her arms just as Anna had earlier.

  "You don't like theater?"

  "No, I do, I like to go to plays. I've seen you in some, remember?"

  "That doesn't mean you like it." Anna knelt down on the floor, looking for the latch on the trunk.

  "I do like it. But 12 coat racks? How efficient is that? Save space and have just one for any play that needs a coat rack. This is a non-profit after all."

  "One coat rack isn't going to fit every director's idea of the scene," Anna said, squinting as she tried and failed to pull the trunk open.

  "Oh come on," Stacy said. "Couldn't that go on forever? I mean if you had the money and the room, you could have fifty coat racks stored away. Or a hundred."

  "If we had the money and room, I'm sure we would. Here we go." There was a click, and Anna opened the trunk, the lid facing towards Stacy and hiding the contents from her. "Fun."

  "What is it?" Stacy asked. "A collection of toothpicks from foreign lands?"

  "Better," said Anna, a grin forming across her face. She reached into the trunk, and held a plastic sword over her head.

  "You said the weapons were locked up in the office," Stacy said. "Kids and all."

  "The metal ones are, but these are just toys. Trunk should have been labeled, though. Hand me the clipboard, please."

  Stacy grabbed the clipboard and sat down next to Anna. They both peered into the trunk.

  There were toy swords with realistic colors, and ones painted pink. Most had "LDP" written in permanent marker under the hilt. One was curved.

  "Hey," Stacy said reaching for the curved one. "My brother had one of these when we were little. It's like an Arab sword."

  "I challenge you," Anna said, pointing her own, straighter plastic toy at her friend.

  Stacy laughed. "Come on," she said, "what are you a 10 year old boy?" She tossed the sword back into the trunk.

  "No, I'm a 31 year old woman and I want to play swords so come on." Anna gestured towards Stacy's abandoned sword. Stacy shook her head and stood up. Anna wacked her on the backside with the sword.

  "Ow," Stacy protested through a laugh. She rubbed her posterior at the point of impact. "I know it's big, but it's not invincible."

  "Then defend it," Anna said, managing to get another smack in.

  Stacy laughed, as her eyes moved from Anna, to the trunk, and back again. Suddenly she swiped down and picked up a straight sword. "You can't duel with a stupid curvy sword," she said. "My brother found that out the hard way." Then she lunged. Anna screamed, and jumped out of the way. "I'm faster than I look, nerd."

  Both women scooted around the tiny confines of the basement room, thrusting and parrying their plastic weapons with all of the grace of two modestly trained apes. Both proved far more adept at squealing and laughing. Finally, Stacy managed a lucky shot and knocked the sword out of Anna's hand. The weapon slid across the room.

  "Okay, now," Anna said, all smiles vanishing for a moment. "That's theater property, how dare you abuse it?"

  "Surrender accepted," Stacy said, catching her breath. "I should not be winded from that." Stacy retrieved Anna's sword and placed it along with her own back into the trunk.

  "Well, well," Anna said. "Dare I say you were having fun just now, playing with props?"

  "I was just messing around with toys, so were you," Stacy said. "It's good to play every now and then."

  "Even if you're not a ten year old boy?"

  "All right, all right,
you've made your point," Stacy said, sitting down on the floor next to the trunk. "I had fun playing with silly toy swords. Is that a crime?"

  "Of course not, but I didn't mean that," Anna said. "You were doing theater just now. You were acting."

  Stacy laughed. "That wasn't theater. It was just pretending."

  "That's a big part of acting, you know. Pretending."

  "Well, yeah, I know. Like I said, I don't mind people acting. I like coming to see shows. I just think all this stuff is a bit much. It's what, 20 different toy swords?"

  "I'm about to find out," Anna said. She scrolled "swords: plastic" on a piece of paper from her clipboard. "Could you check the rest of that stack back there? See if any of them have a label on them too?"

  Stacy stood up with a short grunt. "Yeah, okay."

  Stacy walked back behind the stack of trunks. She reached for the one on top of the stack, but her eye fell onto the nearby shelf, and she stopped. She walked over to the shelf, which was filled with mismatched teacups and saucers, most with tiny chips but some in pristine if dusty condition. She felt drawn to one pot in particular. At one point it had probably been white, but was now an off-yellow. Soft-pink roses, four of them, adorned the side, as well as the lid. Stacy reached for it with both hands and with care lifted it off of the shelf. She held it up to her eyes and smiled.

  "What do you have there?" Anna asked as she rounded the corner. Stacy turned around and held up the teapot.

  "My Gram had this teapot," she said. "Well, one just like it. I mean it was really close to this."

  "Really?" Anna asked. "Brewed her own tea and such?"

  "Yeah," Stacy said, her eyes wide. She took off the lid and smelled the inside. She coughed a little. "Hers didn't smell like dust though." Anna smiled. Stacy went on. "She used to let me help when I was a kid. She'd let me put the tea in first. That teapot was always one of the main things about being at Gram's. One time she finally let me pour. It was heavy and I dropped it. She caught it on the table. It chipped a little, but she wasn't mad at me..."

  Stacy choked on the rest of her sentence and sniffled as tears came to her eyes. Anna rushed to her side, and put her arm around her shoulder, but said nothing.

  "I'm sorry," Stacy said.

  "For what?" Anna asked. "For missing your grandmother? I miss mine. But she didn't have a nice teapot like this one." Anna looked down at the teapot still in Stacy's hand. Stacy laughed through her crying.

  "Gram was a classy lady," Stacy said. "She's been gone a while. I don't know what came over me. I guess it was just seeing a pot like this, you know?"

  Anna nodded. "I know. Objects can do that to us. You want a minute by yourself?"

  "Oh, no, not at all," Stacy said. "I'm good. Really, I am." She turned and put the teapot back onto the shelf with care. "Just one of those things."

  "Need to go home? I can do this."

  "No, Anna, really, I wanna stay and help." Stacy wiped tears out of her eyes with the back of her hand. "Just hadn't thought about Gram in a while."

  The two ladies unstacked the trunks, most of which seemed to be empty, and pulled out the one that had been on the bottom of the pile. It said, "toy swords" on the side, but when Anna opened it, the trunk was empty. She shook her head and removed the sign.

  For a few minutes they counted toy swords in silence until Stacy spoke up. "I still think it's a bit much sometimes, but I get it now. Why they like to have all sorts of choices for their shows."

  "What made you change your mind?"

  "Gram's teapot. I guess a play is more powerful if it's got little touches that give people the feels. Any old teapot might work, but maybe an audience thinks of their Gram when they see an actor using that one."

  Anna nodded. "Like I said, objects do that do us. We don’t have room for everything down here, and we probably do keep a little too much. But the more little things we can do with a show, the more people we can touch. We hope, anyway."

  Stacy nodded and turned her attention to another trunk nearby. "Shall we see what this one is?" Anna nodded. Stacy opened the trunk, and gasped.

  "What?" asked Anna.

  "Well, we have five of…these." Stacy spun the trunk around.

  Anna grimaced as she looked down onto five identical ceramic clown heads. They looked up at her through dull, cracked eyes above their faded-paint red sneers and moth-eaten red collars.

  "I won't judge, though," Stacy said. "Like I said, the power of theater lies in the details. I'm sure it's good to have more than one creepy glass clown head."

  "No," Anna said. "Not at all. There's no damn reason in the world anybody anywhere should have these."

  Living Ghosts

  You stand right outside the front door, lingering on the sidewalk. You've not stepped inside the Little Dionysus Playhouse for over a year. Plenty has gone on within its walls in the mean time, but your memories and the surroundings intersect in such a way that the sensations of the past override the present. It's as though the entire building is locked in a time capsule you’re about to open.

  Work shifts and schedules changed with your new job last year, leaving little time for theater. But now that your schedule has evened out, your friend asked you to teach a one-day workshop, and here you are again at last.

  You're anxious to see the place again. There is just something about this particular community playhouse.

  But you must engage the ghosts. The ghosts of the living. The ghosts that linger within a theater after a show closes. The ghosts born of emotional, dramatic, passionate people calling it a second home for six to eight weeks at a time. Even ghosts of your former self.

  This isn't unique to you. You've discussed it with other actors before. The "psychic imprint" one colleague calls it. "Reflective vibe," says another. A show lingers in invisible ways after it closes, and psychological remnants of your most recent show permeate the building like a mist. Happens to you every time. The longer you've been away, the more potent it is, and the longer it takes to recede.

  Today it's not so bad at first. You enter through the lobby for a change. As an actor you've never spent a great deal of time in here; you usually enter and exit through the back. That's where you know it will hit you hardest.

  You check the clock. You've got about 30 minutes before your workshop starts, so you pass into the house of the theater. The set for the current show is assembled but not painted. Set pieces and furniture are in place. Probably the last week or two of rehearsals, you figure.

  In the last year, there hasn't been much of a chance for you to even watch any shows here. So your last memory of this stage is of sweeping it clean. That was one of your assigned jobs during strike on closing day. You remember that even then, living ghosts of the show had already begun to show up. As you swept, you found yourself stepping over the tricky throw rug everyone in the show had tripped over. The throw rug that wasn't even on stage anymore by that point.

  But you've always found a stage crowded with weaker ghosts. A stage is used so much and changes so often, it's more difficult to home in on a specific memory. The real "ghost" encounters start as soon as you step into the small hallway near the front of the house. The one with "The Funnel" painted on the inside. The one that leads both backstage, and to the green room.

  There's a young woman here, chatting on a cell phone, probably involved in your workshop. She nods at you and steps out of your way. You resist the fruitless urge to warn her that she's standing in Lenny's preferred meditation spot. (One of your unofficial "duties" during your last show.)

  At the other end of the hallway you step through the open door into the green room. For the briefest of moments, in a small corner of your mind you're convinced that if you walked back to the dressing rooms right now, you'd find Aaron still fiddling with his hair in an attempt to get it perfect, and never quite doing so.

  You think of the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment that your brother is obsessed with. You wonder if, so long as you stay outside of the dressing
rooms Aaron is both still there, and not there anymore at the same time. Maybe the analogy doesn't work after all.

  You meander around the green room for a bit. This room that takes on a different feel for every show and every cast. Yet it's always somehow the same.

  You gravitate toward the coffee table near the center of the room. You look at it out of the corner of your eye, and can see the chessboard and pieces set up. It's Rob's move. You've beaten him three times in a row in your little intermission lightning chess challenges. Looking at the table head on now, you see only a stack of books, not a chess board.

  And is there still a trace of that perfume what's-her-name spilled lingering in the air in here? Or is that another living ghost? You decide this time it could actually go either way; the stuff was pretty strong, and there was a lot of it all over the floor that night.

  The clock in the green room reveals you have 20 minutes before your workshop. You make your way to a rack of costumes pulled for the current show. One by one you slide the hangers over the rack, each one with a name hastily written on a piece of masking tape. "Terry" "Bruce" "Serena." Under each name tag are scores of old ones, their browning, curling edges still visible. Perhaps one of them is yours?

  You recognize none of these names, but one of "Serena's" dresses makes you pause. You don't know dresses or fashion, and you couldn't describe this frock to anyone, other than "green" and "soft". But you know women. Women with curves and class. Women like Elizabeth, who wore this exact dress in that show a year ago.

  Elizabeth. How curious she wasn’t the first thing you thought of when you stepped back into the green room. Shouldn't her ghost have been the most potent? Perhaps it's so potent you blocked it out for a while. Or perhaps it was a ghost you exorcised when she moved away. But seeing this dress retrieves her ghost for now.

  You glide your hand down the fuzzy back of the dress. Your fingers linger on the zipper she asked you, of all people, to zip up for her each night before her scene. Someone else would zip it down for her when you were on stage, but you recall with something that's almost a smile that you removed her actual clothing on two (and only two) cold nights near the end of the run. You both knew that your "arrangement" would be as temporary as the show you were in. Still, it was kind of her to send you a farewell email when she got the job halfway across the country. You haven't gotten an email from her since, but somehow that one email and seeing this dress again is enough.

  Of course you're aware of how ridiculous it is to resent this "Serena" for daring to wear this dress for whatever show is happening now. Ridiculous, but true. This is Elizabeth's dress. If you stood here long enough, would you hear her running down The Funnel now to snatch it from the rack on her way to the tiny dressing rooms? Would you catch your breath one last time in anticipation of the shared, secret flirtation between the two of you as you put your hand on her back while you zipped her up?

  You don't find out. You cover Elizabeth's dress with the clothing in front of it, and step away from the rack. It may be a good idea to go over your remarks for the workshop, with just 15 minutes remaining before it begins. You look around, and dance with your own ghost for a bit by studying your notes at the same end table where you always studied your big monologue for that show last year. The first few words of that monologue graze gently over your tongue even all this time later as you clear the small end table and spread your note cards in front of you.

  You decided days ago that the body of the lecture was fine. And you've got a killer conclusion before the Q&A. But how to open?

  In a whisper, you read from your notes, imagining the students in front of you.

  "Welcome to this talk about building a character, which you will find is the keystone to any great performance."

  It sounds worse out loud than it looks on paper. And it looks terrible on paper. You reach into your pocket for your pen, and scratch out the line, the fourth such opening line you've scribbled over on the worn index card. You scratch a few more words down, feeling the muscles in your neck tense as the deadline for the class approaches.

  "We all create art every day," you whisper, testing out a new opening. "It's all a matter of knowing you do it, and doing it on purpose."

  The sentiment is true, you concede, but you don't think it could have been presented in a cornier fashion. You tap your pen on the table top faster and faster until you manage to annoy yourself with the racket, and stop.

  Then you hear conversation coming from The Funnel. You turn around to find two women in their late 30s chatting, each with notebooks. One of them catches your eye.

  "Oh, I'm sorry, hope we didn't disturb you," she says.

  "Not at all," you say, getting to your feet.

  "Are you here for the character workshop?" asks the other woman.

  "I'm here to teach it, yes," you tell them.

  The faces of both women light up with what appears to be mild surprise. You wonder if you really look that out of place. You exchange pleasantries with them. Then you excuse yourself to the bathroom in the lobby. It’s further away than the bathroom near the dressing rooms, but you don't have to use it anyway.

  Precious minutes later you watch yourself in the lobby bathroom mirror for a few moments, digging into your own mind for something, anything that will serve as an opening for this talk. These were adults, you reason, and probably would be more patient than kids or teens. Still, a weak opening to your remarks could set the wrong tone for the whole presentation. Speech-giving 101.

  You mouth a few more half-hearted new openings. You even squint through the frantic ink scratches on your card to give the dismissed openings another shot. As the clock indicates you've got five minutes, you opt to go back to the corny "making art" opening, for want of anything better.

  You check your hair, your teeth and your nose in the mirror. You step out of the men's room back through the lobby and eventually all the way back to the green room. You notice the woman with the phone is no longer standing in Lenny's backstage spot. A speck of you appreciates that.

  Eight to ten people are here in the green room now. Two of them are sitting at the chess table with sandwiches. A trio of the ladies, (two of them being the ones that spoke to you earlier) are sitting on the ratty couch where Laura would catch a quick nap before rehearsal began. The rest are spread throughout the room, gathered in closely. All of them look toward you as you bid the group good morning.

  "Welcome to this character-creation workshop," you begin. The corny line about art is on the tip of your tongue when you happen to glance over to the costume rack, and catch a bit of Elizabeth's dress sticking out from the rest of the clothing. You pause as a thought comes to your mind; Elizabeth has been there for you one last time.

  "This building is filled with all sorts of living ghosts for me," you tell the group. "Ghosts of living people, who left an imprint with their passions. They fade with time, and with other projects, but they'll always be here. If you do enough theater, you'll see them one day too. In fact, you may just leave a few of them here yourself."

  They look intrigued.

  Accidental Audition

  "Thank you. If you could send the next person out that would be great."

  Arthur made a few marks in his director's notebook. When he looked back up at the stage, the actor who'd just concluded his audition was still standing there. "Was there something else?" Arthur asked.

  "Did you have a specific person you wanted to come out next or…"

  "No just hand find the next one trying out and send them in please."

  The actor left for the green room.

  Arthur had arrived late that morning. He'd hastily scattered the audition material in the green room. Because he had nobody there to help him with auditions, he'd written the instructions for what to do in thick marker on a piece of poster board. Nobody had yet understood it. Perhaps they hadn't even read it.

  Already he was wearing too many hats for this show. He hadn't been able to find anybody to be
a stage manager, since his usual choice was in college for the semester. He was on his own, and it was grinding his nerves into powder.

  A young woman made her awkward way onto the stage, and he sighed. He'd meant for the next person in line reading for the lead male role to come in, not just the next random person. Probably should have said that to the outgoing actor. But he didn't.

  "I take it you aren't here to read for Anthony?" Arthur asked.

  The young woman looked behind her and then at her script. "No," she said, brushing something off of her unzipped raggedy hoody. "No, he just said…"

  "That's my fault. Just give me a minute, and let me find my copy of Samantha's lines."

  Arthur shuffled through papers, half of which fell to the floor. He sighed and pulled out a small set of pages stapled together.

  "All right, and what is your name?" he asked the girl.

  "Lisa," she said. "Burton."

  "Lisa, let's take a look at Samantha's first speech on page…"

  "Did you want my audition sheet?"

  "Oh, yes. Yes, I'll take it, thank you."

  Arthur eased himself out of his front row seat and removed the sheet from the girl’s hand. He skimmed it, and bit his tongue. No previous theater experience. He'd hit the losers jackpot with those today. He sat back down and regurgitated his same tired speech.

  "I see you have no experience. Don't be nervous, I'm just trying to asses where you would best fit into the show. If you don't get in I hope you won't be discouraged."

  "Thank you," she said. "I saw that on the poster board in the green room."

  At least somebody had read it.

  "Yes, well," Arthur said, "if you could just start at the first page, right as Samantha enters and confronts her sister."

  "How do I know, I mean when do I stop reading? On the last page?"

  "Just keep going until I stop you, please."

  "Okay."

  This Lisa stood on the stage in her hoody and jeans looking towards Arthur. The stage lights reflected off of the thick lenses of her stout eyewear. When she moved ever so slightly to the left, still saying nothing, the reflection caught Arthur in the eye and he had to squint.

  After another moment of silence, Arthur called up to her. "You can start anytime you want to."

  "Oh, okay, thank you."

  Lisa flew off stage before Arthur had a chance to protest. He rested his head in his hand and waited. A moment later he jumped as Lisa exploded onto the stage, covering her face with the script as she vomited forth Samantha's lines.

  She almost tripped once as she lumbered back and forth on the stage, her face behind the script. She corrected herself and somehow stayed on her feet, but she lost her place in the script and after some muttering to herself resumed the speech. Every few minutes the light reflecting from her glasses thrust-and-parried itself in a small, luminescent oval all over the semi-dark house as though it were a warlike fairy doing battle with an unseen enemy.

  After a two minute span stretched to its absolute limit by pauses, lost places, and wild gesticulations, Lisa at last removed the script from her face, and let it rest by her side. She panted and her glasses reflected the light back at him. He squinted and looked at her a moment.

  "All right," he said at last. "How about we have you read as Judy this time. I'll read Samantha's lines."

  "Okay."

  "By the way, do you ever wear contacts?"

  Lisa put her hand up to the bridge of the glasses as she spoke. "Well, contacts dry out my eyes. I think. I mean they always did. Maybe I could find a different kind if that would help. If that would look better. Do you think I should? Should I get some and come back and read with them another day?"

  "No, no," Arthur said. "No, we don't need to do that. What if you didn't wear the glasses?"

  "I can't see two feet in front of me."

  Somehow that seemed inevitable to him. He nodded. Lisa said nothing the entire time, only looked down at him. "Let's have you read the sister's lines now, shall we?"

  He went through the page of simple dialogue with her twice, offering suggestions as to how to improve after the first. He spent a little extra time on her audition. He often did that with those who had no chance, so it didn't feel so obvious to them they had no chance. Lisa was probably the worst he'd seen all day. Truth be told she was probably the worst he'd seen in several years at the LDP.

  "Thank you for trying out today, Lisa," he said, another pat response. "I should be in touch with everyone within the week, one way or the other. You can send the next person in now."

  "Thanks. And do you mean the next person to read for Samantha, or just the next person there?"

  "Actually, if you'd be willing to ask around for the next guy reading for Anthony and send him back, that would be great, thank you. I need to use the bathroom, but please let everybody know I will be back in a moment."

  "Okay, thanks again."

  "Thank you," he said as he made his way up the aisle toward the bathrooms in the lobby.

  When he came back to the house, a college-aged man with an unkempt beard sat on the stage holding papers. Arthur greeted the would-be actor. "Sorry for keeping you waiting, I've been at this all morning."

  "It's cool, man, no worries," said the beard.

  "You're reading for Anthony, right?"

  "Yep."

  "I just need a minute to gather these papers here and find the right section.”

  "No problem."

  Arthur lowered himself onto the floor and picked up the stacks of paper that he'd dropped just before Lisa's audition. He grunted his way back into a standing position and reached out his hand toward the bearded guy.

  "I'll take your audition sheet now," Arthur said. The guy handed him a stack of about 15 papers.

  "Mine's on top," the beard said.

  "What are all of these for then?" Arthur asked, flipping through the stack.

  "Um, yeah, that's everybody's audition sheet," said the Beard. "Everybody back there. This one chick was looking for all the guys who wanted to play Anthony, so she just collected everybody's sheet and put them in order by the characters they want to read for. All the Anthonys on top so you can just ask for the next dude by name."

  Arthur looked down at the pages. It was as the beard said…they were arranged by character all the way down to those who only wanted a bit part.

  "Who did this again?" Arthur asked.

  "Some chick with a hoody on and glasses. She was kind of cute, I think she read before me. She straightened up the scripts in the green room too."

  Arthur excused himself and made his way from the front row and down the skinny hallway that led to the green room. When he emerged on the other side, he saw five piles of scripts neatly stacked on the folding table he'd hastily set up that morning. A piece of scrap paper on top of each stack had the name of a character scribbled onto it.

  "Are you here to audition?" asked a middle aged-woman in a sweater. "Scripts are arranged by character, and we all sort of broke off into groups for each character to run lines with each other."

  "Is the girl in the hoody still here?" Arthur asked. "The one that set up these little piles?"

  "I don't think so," said the woman. "She just sort of threw all of this together and left."

  "Need to find her sheet," Arthur said as he turned back into the hallway. When he got back into the house, the Beard was reading lines to himself. Arthur ignored him and he shuffled through the mess of papers he'd left on his seat. At last he found Lisa's. He apologized to the Beard again and made his way to the lobby with Lisa's sheet. In the light, he pulled out his cell phone and entered Lisa's number. She answered, sounding uncertain.

  "Lisa, it's Arthur Garrick from the Little Dionysus Playhouse. I was thinking about your audition a minute ago. I know you said you don't know anything about theater, but you know what a stage manager is, right?"

  Story Summit

  Four teenagers, part of the new summer workshop program at the Little Di
onysus Playhouse, were gathered in a thin passageway at the theater. It was their first day at the workshop and none of them had been to the playhouse before. All four of them looked up now at some words painted high up on one of the walls of this passageway.

  “The Funnel,” it said, in faded blue paint.

  "Maybe it means to funnel your creativity toward the stage," said the smallest of the quartet, a scrawny student in a golf shirt and blue jeans.

  "But it doesn't point to the stage, you know?" asked the girl in the baseball cap as she once again removed someone's hand from her shoulder.

  "Maybe it used to," said he with the wandering hands, the tallest of the group. "It's an old building, probably been rebuilt a couple of times over the years."

  The kid in the golf shirt spoke again. "Maybe the guy running the workshop will tell us."

  "Are you going to ask?" asked Ball Cap Girl.

  Golf Shirt looked at her and shrugged. "I don't know. I mean I guess I could, if you like."

  "Or I can, it doesn't bother me to ask, I just didn't want to if you were going to," said Ball Cap.

  "Whatever," Golf Shirt said.

  "It's not even shaped like a funnel," said the quiet girl in overalls who hadn't spoken until then. "It's just a hallway. Rectangular."

  "You sound like my geometry teacher," said Hands.

  "You behave like a molester," said Quiet Girl.

  "Come on, now," said Hands, but Ball Cap interrupted. "Can we just keep moving? We can talk about this in the other room."

  The group moved through the door at the end of this “Funnel” and into the green room of the playhouse. No other students had arrived yet.

  Ball Cap sat down on a worn out sofa that looked ready to collapse any moment. She stood up and moved right away to a nearby chair when Hands sat down next to her.

  "Do you two even know each other?" asked Golf Shirt.

  "Sadly, yes," said Ball Cap. "In another life we dated."

  "Awkward," said Quiet Girl.

  "Just because you've never got felt up, doesn't mean nobody else gets to be," said Hands to Quiet Girl.

  "Maybe I prefer to be felt up by men as opposed to boys," said Quiet Girl.

  "All right, enough," said Golf Shirt. "Is it gonna be five weeks of this? Can we just chill, please?" After nobody said anything for a minute, he spoke up again. "The Funnel…who would paint that up there?"

  It was quiet a moment as Hands moved to the opposite side of the room and made to sit down on a chair. He looked at it, had second thoughts, and switched to another.

  "But why hasn't it been painted over?" asked Quiet Girl. "It must mean something important to this place or else they'd have cleaned it off, right?"

  "Well, maybe not," said Ball Cap. "Audiences don't get to go in there during the show. That one sign said ‘Actors Only Beyond This Point’. Maybe they figure nobody ever sees in there, so why go through the effort? Why waste the paint to fix it?"

  "Why waste our time?" asked Hands. "Do we really care why somebody painted a bunch of words up there?"

  "Maybe you don't," said Ball Cap. "But some of us are deeper than that."

  "Seriously you two," said Golf Shirt. "Can we keep the spats out of it? I'm trying to think creatively here. Now the syllabus said we should be ready to do that for this workshop, so let's do it already."

  "Lead us then," said Hands. "If you know so much about it."

  "Fine, I will," said Golf Shirt. He walked around the room. "Let's think, what do we know? What can we guess?”

  "Blue paint," said Ball Cap. "Letters are pretty neat, so maybe an artist painted them."

  "I like that," said Golf Shirt.

  "Must have meant something," said Quiet Girl. "Nobody could reach that high and paint that well without a ladder or something. Took some effort."

  "Yeah, good point," said Ball Cap. "So an artist takes the time to grab a stool or something, and a bucket of paint, and paints "The Funnel" high up on a wall in a hallway."

  "Cool," said Golf Shirt. "But why does an artist call a hallway a funnel?"

  "Maybe he wasn't," said Hands. All of them looked in his direction.

  "What do you mean?" asked Ball Cap.

  "I mean," said Hands in a mocking voice, "that 'the Funnel' might be talking about something else. He didn't have to mean the hallway just because he painted it there."

  "Yeah, true," said Golf Shirt.

  "I still think it was the hallway itself," said Ball Cap. Quiet Girl agreed.

  "But you don't know, do you?" asked Hands.

  Golf Shirt opened his notebook and pulled out a paper. "This syllabus they sent us," he said. "Says one of our first activities will be to get in groups and make up a story sometime today, based on an object. Let's get ahead and do it now about those words.”

  All agreed and Golf Shirt continued. "Says we're supposed to let each person tell a part of the story based on the object. How about we start with you?" He indicated Hands.

  Ball Cap huffed and Quiet Girl rolled her eyes. But Hands stood up and looked at both of them a moment. "Okay then," he began. "Like I said, the dude that painted it didn't mean the hallway itself. Not at first. He's a painter, and artist, and somebody wants him to do something. Break the rules over something. So he does this graffiti thing to say 'up yours' to the rules."

  Hands paused, nodded, and sat back on the couch.

  "But why break the rules?" asked Ball Cap. "What's he do that for?"

  "Love," said Quiet Girl. All eyes on her as she looked at the floor. "He wouldn't normally do something like that, but he does it for love. Something about who he loves. It means something to both of them."

  "An inside thing," said Golf Shirt as he resumed pacing. "We don't know what it is. Nobody knew but the painter and the woman he loved."

  "Or the man," said Ball Cap, extending an open palm into the air. "Artist could have been a woman. Or you know, they both could have been men or women."

  Golf Shirt nodded. "Fair enough."

  Hands sniffed but said nothing.

  "Looks like it's been there a while," Quiet Girl said. "Back then you probably couldn't be openly gay, right?"

  "Not even in a theater?" asked Golf Shirt.

  "Probably not in a community theater," Ball Cap said. She shook her head. "Not if it was like 50 years ago or something, you know?"

  The group said nothing for a moment. Golf Shirt paced. Ball Cap leaned back on the couch. Hands closed his eyes and rubbed his knees. Quiet Girl tilted her head to the side.

  "Code," said Hands. "If this dude was gay or something, and he'd have to keep it secret, maybe he paints the words on that wall as a code. A message to his gay lover or something. Don't know what those words might mean to a flame, but…"

  "Will you just grow up?" Ball Cap snapped. "And don't call them flames, you ass."

  "Hey, I'm the one who came up with the idea, not you," Hands snapped back.

  "Let's say it's a code," Golf Shirt called out over the developing spat. "Code for what? If it's a message for his lover, what does it mean?"

  "I love you," Quiet Girl said. "Or at least 'remember me'. Like I said, it's a pretty bold thing to do."

  "And it's still there, after all this time," Golf Shirt said. "So somebody who was in charge must have never let anybody paint over it. It must have been important to them too. Maybe whoever was in charge was the painter's lover. There was gay discrimination then, so maybe he was banned from the theater, and left that little code for the guy in charge to remember him by."

  "Yeah, except if some gay a long time ago was in charge of this place, he could just let his lover stay," Hands said.

  "Could be the Board of Directors," said Quiet Girl. "They forced his hand. That's not as interesting a story though, if you ask me."

  "Well the gay painter had to leave for some reason, didn't he?" asked Hands. "Isn't that what we're going for?"

  "War," said Ball Cap. "Maybe the painter or his lover has to go off to war, and leaves that
up there to honor him. Any wars 50 years ago?"

  "Vietnam," said Quiet Girl. "Early Vietnam."

  Ball Cap sunk back into her chair. "Yeah. That's kind of cheap though, Vietnam."

  "What do you mean, cheap?" asked Hands. "My uncle was in that war, you know."

  "I don't mean the people who fought it were cheap," answered Ball Cap. "I mean for our story it doesn't seem to fit. Like it's too rushed, I don't know. I don't wanna say romantic, because that's kind of sick when it comes to war, but…"

  "Why not romantic?" asked Golf Shirt. "What's wrong with that? We're creating characters and a story. Drama is important. If another war suits the story better, I'm cool with that."

  "World War II then," said Quiet Girl. "If any war was ever noble, it was probably that one. Just say the paint's been there 70 years or something. We don't actually know how long, anyway.”

  "Yeah,” said Golf Shirt. "I think the theater website said something about this place closing for a few years during the war."

  Hands stood up and put his hands in his pockets. "So this gay dude paints the words on the wall out there just before this place closes up because of World War II. And when they open it back up after the war is over, somebody finds it."

  "The manager or president of the theater, whatever the title is" said Ball Cap. She stood up. "He was too old to go to war, but his lover wasn't."

  "The lover never comes back," said Quiet Girl. "The older man knows the message is for him and doesn't let anybody paint over it. By the time he's gone too, people are used to it."

  "So it stays up there, until people forget what it even means," said Golf Shirt.

  "And now it's just like some kind of tradition, and nobody messes with it anymore," said Hands.

  Again they were quiet a moment.

  "I would totally read a novel about that," said Ball Cap.

  "Or in this case, maybe see a play about it?" asked Golf Shirt.

  Ball Cap nodded.

  "Me too," said Quiet Girl, in her quietest voice yet. The others didn't notice, but she pulled a small notebook out of her pocket, and began to write vigorously.

  "I'd see it, I guess," said Hands. "But I think I'd also wanna try being in it. In the play."

  "You, in a play like that?" asked Ball Cap with a laugh. "You in any play?"

  "I'm here aren't I?" asked Hands. "I'm not sure about playing the gay, but I like doing stuff that's difficult to do. Or what's the point?"

  "There is none," said Quiet Girl. Hands looked over at her for a brief moment, nodded, and leaned back in his chair.

  The door to the Funnel opened. In stepped a few more people their age with a man older than they were, in his 30's or so. Average height or a little less. One hand carried a folder and the other was in his pocket. He wore blue jeans and a solid black shirt. He walked to the middle of the room.

  "If we're all ready, I'd like to get started for today, if you please," he said. "I'm Matt and I despise silly introduction games, so if it doesn't bother you too much," he pulled a sheet of sticky name tags out of his folder, "I'd like you to make use of these, please."

  The group of teens began writing their names and peeling off their stickers one by one as the instructor kept talking.

  "There's a bit of drama in every thing you can see," the instructor said. "Find the story behind it. Make it human. Humanity is lurking somewhere behind everything, you just have to find it. And in theater if you can't find it, you create it. You make it up, if you have to. Make sense?"

  "Total sense," said Golf Shirt. As the instructor continued talking, three out of the seven teens looked at Golf Shirt and nodded at him.

  Sound of Serendipity

  "I'm not arrogant," he told me as I followed him up the spiral metal staircase to the light and sound booths. "People come to shows to see actors perform, period. I'm afraid any techie who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves."

  At the top of the enclosed stairs we passed through a door into the lighting booth, and then into the adjacent sound booth. I'd been assistant sound designer for the show for a week and this was the first time I'd actually been up there. It overlooked the stage from an elevated position in the back of the house. A mixer board with rows of levers all labeled with white masking tape that had yellowed with time sat on the desk. So did a functional but outdated computer. He sat down and typed on it.

  He was Dennis, sound designer extraordinaire for many productions at the Little Dionysus Playhouse and other community theaters. He typed with just one hand, and ran the fingers of his other through a long, unruly beard. The sweat on his bald head glistened under the fluorescent lighting.

  "Lighting guys think all that matters is light," Dennis said. Everything he said expressed little more than dull amusement. "Set designers think audiences take away nothing more than an impression of what they built. And of course nothing can happen without the all-powerful demigods known as stage managers. Or so they think."

  Dennis had still not looked up from the computer, but rather was reading what to me were mere numbers and letters on the computer screen. I assumed he'd get around to explaining them. In fact I assumed he'd get around to teaching me many things about sound production. That's why I volunteered for this show instead of the previous one.

  "Dennis is doing the next show," I'd been told. "You'll learn a lot more from him."

  So I contacted this Dennis, and a few weeks later was his assistant.

  "So what you're saying is," I said, "you don't think your sound design is the most important thing about a play?"

  He shook his head. "Maybe the second-most important thing. I lament the plight of the deaf more than that of the blind. The blind cannot see the world, but the deaf are more alone, I think."

  He punched one more button, and then gestured me back through the lighting booth. He told me we'd talk more about the soundboard later.

  "We internalize what we hear so much more than what we see," Dennis said on our way back down the stairs. "In utero we can hear before we see. Sound is the result of the movement of the universe, and our perception of it. All sound is music, and we're built for music."

  I thought he was taking it a bit too far, but I could see his point.

  Back down in the house Dennis pulled out a small electronic device that measured some aspect of sound quality he said I didn't have to worry about, so I didn't. Instead I followed him back down the hallway they called The Funnel, (nobody knows why), that led from the house to the green room. Earlier in the day he had set up several microphones in this room.

  "I'm not giving up," he said. "I don't believe in the easy way. Or in the electronic way." He spread his arms wide, as though he were trying to hug the entire room. "Somewhere in this room the sound of an angel arriving is waiting to happen. And we, my friend, are going to find it."

  The script called for an angel to enter a room while one of the characters slept. The noise, described as "only disturbing enough to rouse someone from sleep, not loud", did not exist in any sound effects collection. And if it had, Dennis wouldn't have used it.

  "For sound to capture our imagination," he said, (for about the tenth time since I'd signed on with this show), "it has to be organic. Hands hitting jelly, celery breaking, that's the stuff."

  His adherence to an antiquated method of creating sound fascinated me, and eventually I did learn quite a bit from Dennis. But on that day, I just wondered if we would ever get the angel sound.

  "Grab stuff. Anything," he told me. "You can't go wrong, just start anywhere. No pre-conceived notions, just anything that will make a lasting sound. First rule of sound engineering: don't be afraid to try anything."

  I had fun digging through the random items in the green room. I brought out champagne glasses, a violin with one string, a kazoo, a bag of foreign coins, a metal ruler, a stack of butter knives, and some empty beer bottles. I put them all on the nearby table and Dennis cataloged them.

  "I like your style," he said, surveying what I'd brought out,
along with a few of the items he himself had pulled from the various shelves and crannies of the green room. "Let's get to it."

  "Shouldn't we do all of this in a studio somewhere?" I asked him.

  "That's not in the show's budget. Besides, this is a challenge for us. If I'm not challenged, I see little purpose in leaving home."

  He nodded towards the champagne glasses as he put on a pair of headphones.

  I flicked one of the glasses with my finger. The predictable hollow chime sounded.

  "Sounds too much like someone flicking a champagne glass," he said. "We need novelty. Moving on."

  I tapped the beer bottles next. Rolled the bag of coins around. Struck the metal ruler with a pen. Tossed the ruler to the floor. (That was an obnoxious noise.) Gave a butter knife the same treatment as the ruler. Banged the ruler with the butter knife and vice-versa. Then back to the beer bottles, rolling them over a table. Then we rolled the champagne glasses.

  I had a last minute idea to spin one of the butter knives on the table. This produced a rhythmic white noise accompanied by a slight click as it spun in various cycles. I thought we might have had something when Dennis had me spin the knife again.

  After the third spin died down and the knife skidded to a warbling halt, I looked at him. His eyes were closed, and his hands over the earphones he wore. He stayed like that long enough for me to wonder if he was okay. He exhaled at last and declared, "Not quite. I like it, I want to use that for something in the future, but it just isn't angelic, you know?"

  If he said so.

  He shook his head several times as his gaze passed over the many objects we'd tried.

  "Let's go back up to the booth for a while," he said. I detected slight deflation in his voice for the first time. "We'll deal with this later. I want to teach you to run the board."

  We called it a day up in the booth about an hour later. We got a lot done, but Dennis seemed slower than before. More distant. He shut off the lights and we passed into the neighboring light booth. He was just passing into the stairway when he stopped and snapped his fingers.

  "They asked me to have a look at one of the auxiliary speakers," he said, pointing towards the ceiling. "Up in the catwalk. Are you afraid of heights?"

  "No."

  "Then would you mind climbing up there? I would, but I get so cramped."

  Dennis was a bit heavyset. If I were he, I wouldn't like climbing up into the catwalk either. I agreed to go in his place.

  "We just need to make sure it's still bolted down tight," he said. "Someone thought it looked off or something." He pointed to a shelf on the back wall of the light booth. "Grab a flash light and a wrench. It's the first speaker you'll come to on your left up there. Just tighten any loose bolts. I wish they'd just replace it."

  I grabbed the needed tools and ascended a small metal ladder that led up into the lighting cat walk. I crawled and clanked my way to the speaker in question. My survey found one loose bolt, which I tightened. I turned around and began my descent back down the ladder.

  As my feet hit the first rung I felt the wrench in my back pocket begin to slip. I had no way to contort myself so as to secure it. As I took another rung, I knew it was about escape completely.

  "Heads," I shouted down to Dennis. I'd been told that this was the standard (and probably useless) warning in the theater world that something dangerous, or at least painful, was falling to the earth from an elevated position.

  I both heard the sound and felt the reverberation of the wrench bounce off of one of the metal ladder's rungs before coming to stop on the floor below.

  When I got down to the light booth, I picked up the wrench and started to apologize to Dennis. He wasn't there.

  "Don't go anywhere," I heard him call from the stairway.

  I looked out of the window of the booth that overlooked the stage and saw him running back toward The Funnel. I shrugged and waited. A few minutes later I saw Dennis come running back through the house with wires, cables and microphones dangling from him like kudzu.

  I made sure to stay out of his way as he set up the tiny recording devices all over the light booth.

  "The wrench on the ladder," he said to me at last. "It's the sound we're looking for, my friend. That's our angel arriving." He pointed to the ladder. "It was just a little too low. I'm thinking if you stand on a different rung and drop the wrench, we might have what we need. All set?"

  And so it was that I spent the next half-hour or so moving up and down on a ladder, testing the sound a wrench made when dropped from various locations. And thus the tiniest spark of inspiration returned to the eyes of a man who otherwise had little to no personality. And thus was born, (eventually) a delightful, otherworldly sound effect that weeks later audiences would spend most of intermission trying to identify.

  "First rule of sound engineering," Dennis told me later. "Accidents are better than planning."

  Dueling Carols

  Christmas Harmony? Two Local Theaters Hit By Flu Combine Their Resources For 'A Christmas Carol'-- by local-interest reporter Dan Mullinix

  Two regional community theaters have teamed up to save what would have been a Dickensless holiday season in our area. Due to the flu outbreak, both the Little Dionysus Playhouse and the Prescott Players suffered significant drops in the respective casts of 'A Christmas Carol'. So much so, both productions were well on their way to being canceled as little as two weeks ago.

  Enter stage left, Doug Strindberg, Managing Director of the Prescott Players.

  "It felt like a real shame to let all that hard work go to waste," he said. "It would've been a shame to not have any Christmas shows in the area, too. And since we were both doing the same script by chance, I thought I'd make a call."

  That call was to Doctor Harrison Gruber. Dr. Gruber is the acting president of the LDP while the full time president is recovering from a minor illness.

  "It sounded fantastic," Gruber said of the proposed collaboration. "We were hanging on by a thread and they had already canceled their show. The writing was on the wall…we were going to have to cancel our own before long. I was personally treating half of our cast for the flu."

  This is not the first time the two community theaters have collaborated. According to both men, their respective companies have often exchanged props and costumes as needed over the years. But this marks the first time the two companies have been joint producers of a play.

  "They're what, an hour and a half's drive from here?" Strindberg guessed. "Two hours if highway traffic is bad? We're local to one another, but not exactly neighbors."

  Unfortunately for Strindberg, it is his company that will be forced to do most of the driving; it was decided that the actual production would take place at the LDP facility, but under the direction of Stuart Porter, who was set to direct the Prescott Players production.

  "One thing I've learned in 40 years of theater," Porter told me, "is that nothing is predictable. Things can shift, and you've got to adjust. I've never directed in this venue before, and it's been sort of a delight exploring a new stage."